Making everyone happy is impossible. Pissing them off is a piece of cake. I like cake.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Yet more IPCC bollocks

This has been a good year so far, certainly in the opinion of your humble Devil. The decision to prosecute even some of the thieving MPs is a small victory for those of us who have long maintained that those fuckers were stealing our money.

But far greater vindication, as far as I am concerned, has come in the slow but steady collapse of the climate change alarmist camp; as someone who has been calling "bullshit" on this scam—in writing at least—for five years, watching the destruction started by the leak of the CRU documents has been a joy to behold.

Whilst some of us swarmed over the emails and the data—delighting at the revelations about dirty tricks and shoddy statistical analysis that revealed the truth of our suspicions—EUReferendum was leading the charge against the High Priest of the IPCC. As Richard North showed, Dr Rajendra K Pachauri has redefined the word "compromised"—his nexus of power and money inextricably bound up with his position as IPCC Chairman and entirely dependent on the alarmist AGW position.

It is really the kind of investigative journalism that Private Eye used to do so well: on this topic, however, the Eye has dropped the ball. Or, rather, as The Englishman points out, they never even picked it up.

If you will allow me to digress for a second, the Eye's refusal to acknowledge the existence of blogs—a blindness born of a hatred and contempt that borders on the pathological—has combined with its pathetic online presence (such as the lack of an online archive) and its fortnightly release to render the magazine increasingly irrelevent. It is rare, now, to find a story in Private Eye that has not already been substantially covered—often in a rather better and more interesting way—by blogs. Private Eye will continue to be bought by many, but it is becoming more and more of a luxury for political anoraks, rather than the necessity that it once was.

To return to the general subject of this post, EUReferendum's most valuable contribution has been in the revelations of "mistakes" in the IPCC reports themselves.

Because, whilst Pachauri himself might be hopelessly compromised, true believers of the climate change faith could still point out that the genial Indian did not actually, personally write the reports and that the "scientists" who did so nevertheless knew what they were talking about.

The IPCC [sic] contains hundreds if not thousands of graphs and claims — and yet one or two slips were used as an excuse to rubbish the whole thing.

Wow! The "IPCC" has hundreds of graphs. Well, fuck me: they must be right, eh?

What Sunny hasn't grasped—or, rather, wilfully refuses to grasp—is that if one or more claims are suspect, then they are all suspect. As I pointed out in a longish post entitled A Credibility Gap, if the IPCC has been cooking the books, then the entire catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC) argument falls apart.

This kind of revelation strikes at the very heart of the CACC foundations because without the IPCC there is no catastrophic anthropogenic climate change....

The trouble is that whilst climatologists might have a rather better overview of these studies than myself or Bishop Hill (who are, after all, merely amateurs with a day job to hold down), it is very unlikely that they have actually read all of these studies.

And the politicians certainly haven't.

All of these people rely on those at the IPCC whose day job is to study and collate these reports to draw the evidence together....

Think of the process as a massive inverted pyramid with the downward-facing point as the raw data and the ever-increasing mass on top as the multiplicity of reports based on said data. Obviously, if the data are wrong, so are all of the models, reports and prognostications based on them.

Similarly, the faith in CACC is based on the credibility of the IPCC simply because people do not have the time to do what the IPCC does, i.e. to collate and assess the many hundreds of reports on climate. And the IPCC is increasingly compromised.

Evidence is building that IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035 was not only a deliberate fraud, but efforts were made to cover it up when the figure was challenged.

Some of the pieces of the jigsaw are already there in the public domain, starting with Ben Webster's piece in The Times on Saturday – which we analysed in this post. This made it clear that Rajendra Pachauri was appraised of what he now claims was a "mistake" by an Indian science journalist, last November.

But the story is taken further by Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times today, under the heading: "Panel ignored warnings on glacier error". There, he reports that the leaders of the IPCC had known for weeks and probably months about the "error" and had even convened private conferences to discuss it.

There is a lot more: your humble Devil has not been able to keep up with the pace of stories released by EUReferendum, but it appears that the IPCC knew that the claim was false, but it was kept in the reports in order to drive increasing levels of funding to Rajendra Pachauri's TERI Institute.

Further embarrassment for the IPCC has come in the form of Amazongate, again exposed by EUReferendum and enthusiastically taken up by the MSM.

From Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times we get an article headed: "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim," - one of several on climate change in today's edition

It tells us that a "startling report" in the IPCC report claiming that that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise."

This is "Amazongate" writ large, where the IPCC launched the scare story that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland – and the source turns out to be a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists.

They had based their "research" (Leake's quotations) on a study published in Nature which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

The detail is familiar to readers of this blog, and some might note a small addition at the end of the piece which says: "Research by Richard North", in what has been a fruitful partnership.

Indeed it has—and the revelations have come thick and fast. Essentially, vast swathes of the IPCC ARA4 seem to have been based not on properly researched, peer-reviewed scientific papers, but from deeply biased, unscientific and poorly presented reports by such notable organsiations as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an article in Climbing magazine and, in one case, from a Geography Student's degree thesis.

In other words, far from being the last word in science, the IPCC ARA4 is a collection of third-hand anecdotes and poorly researched reports from organisations with an axe to grind.

Following an investigation by this blog (and with the story also told in The Sunday Times), another major "mistake" in the IPCC's benchmark Fourth Assessment Report has emerged.

Similar in effect to the erroneous "2035" claim – the year the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt – in this instance we find that the IPCC has wrongly claimed that in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.

At best, this is a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims.

Unlike the glacier claim, which was confined to a section of the technical Working Group II report, this "50 percent by 2020" claim forms part of the key Synthesis Report, the production of which was the personal responsibility of the chair of the IPCC, Dr R K Pachauri. It has been repeated by him in many public fora. He, therefore, bears a personal responsibility for the error.

In this lengthy post, we examine the nature and background of this latest debacle, which is now under investigation by IPCC scientists and officials.

It is a lengthy post—even by Richard's standards—but is well worth reading in full. Essentially, the IPCC and Pachauri have been cherry-picking data from various reports that are themselves not peer-reviewed—or in any way independently verified. Or, in some circumstances, unsubstantiated data from unreviewed reports have been used in the IPCC reports, which are then cited in similar reports and substantiated figures and then the IPCC uses those same successor reports to bolster the credibility of its own baseless "findings".

In short, the entire system is corrupt; evidence is being, effectively, fabricated; far from being the last work on the science of climate change, the UN's IPCC has been sticking to what that body knows best—corruption in the service of vested interests.

Still, in what seems to be a bit of a departure for UN staff, as least the bastards aren't pimpingkids.

The process started with the confirmation of data corruption at the UEA, and the somewhat unorthodox practices of the CRU team; with The Club being so intimately involved with the IPCC, it was only a matter of time before interested parties followed the trail to Pachauri and the UN's climate body.

Now, the credibility of the IPCC, and its reports, is shot to pieces. Whilst true believers like Sunny Hundal continue to screech and wail, the evidence of corruption is swiftly overwhelming the anyway flimsy evidence for CACC.

I stopped reading the Eye a few years ago disgusted by their MMR conspiracy nonsense. Also by the endless pointless sniping at Oona King by the Eye's staff SWP'ers who wanted their man Galloway in that seat.

These days I sometimes have a quick look through it while I'm in the supermarket but I haven't seen anything worth reading for a couple of years. All their stories have either been covered by the blogs months before and often by the MSN anyway as the Eye is so late on them.

"...those of us who have long maintained that those fuckers were stealing our money...." Worse much worse than that. 'They' have been destroying our wealth. Stealing our money is just one part of a much bigger wealth destruction agenda.

Hislop made me cringe with his acceptance of AGW.The worst one was the mechanical polar bear on Jules Hollands Hootmanay and all the other luvvies bullshiting about AGW.Even "big ears thicky" believes itProbably they all have investments there .Ho Ho !The news that the Indians have given the IPCC the finger was monumental.China may very well be next.That would mean half the human beings in the world are sceptics.Its over .But the thieves will try to repackage it all, the rich and the so called elite (aka greedy materialistic bastards)have billions to lose due to their own dishonesty.They will still try to ram it down our throats,they wil get nasty too I believe.But aside from that I want to see all these fools crooks and liars fry slowly !They just look plain stupid now.Duuuh! I believe in AGW duuuuh!

'I still can't get my head around the idiocy of that Sunny Hoondal article'.

As the Eye would have said in its glory days (as DK says, sadly long gone), 'shome mishtake surely'?!

DK - as you note, it's been a good year so far. I am loving taking the piss out of my lefty work colleagues. :-) It's cruel, but then, they deserve it for inflicting Gordon the Moron and his mates on us all.